Giocagiò

Giocagiò turns the promise of fortune into a grammar of evaluation that assigns the individual a price, a combination and a predetermined possibility of redemption. In the Scratch & Win series, Zampogna does not represent the ticket as a mere consumer object, but expands its code until it coincides with the space of experience. The figure thus enters a system in which playing does not mean choosing. It means accepting values, instructions and probabilities organised elsewhere. The hope for change survives, but only in the standardised form of an immediate win.

The monochrome figure interrupts the game graphics, yet her static frontality makes her at once protagonist, stake and surface to be classified. The reduction of the body to an almost printed image weakens the distance between personal identity and promotional language: the individual seems to occupy the ticket, while the ticket actually defines her condition. Around her, the imperative lettering, the circular stamp bearing the value of one euro and the enlarged die do not construct a narrative setting. Instead, they converge in a commercial device that measures desire rather than fulfilling it. The mixed media on paper also preserves the heterogeneity between portrait and graphic signs, while forcing them onto the same fragile, serial surface, close to the short life of promotional material.

The work takes the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” to a more radical consequence: media reality no longer overlaps the person as a commentary, but supplies the categories through which she becomes legible. The irony of the game remains inseparable from a graver condition, since the invitation to pursue fortune conceals the poverty of the alternatives offered. Exhibited in 2007 in «Cirkus», the work presents a contemporary condition in which the desire for change is admitted only after being converted into price, prize and probability.